The vast majority of users would prefer not to have to write an entire layout and stylesheet for each site they visit, nor would they consider having all sites conform to a single layout or style to be of any value. It's only very small minority of people (probably exclusive to HN) who would prefer the web was nothing more than JSON or raw bitstreams.
But again - geminispace works the way you want. Gemtext doesn't use stylesheets and only has very basic markup. Everything is dictated and controlled by the browser. And the protocol is specifically designed such that writing a client for it is easy.
I don’t think this would be a reasonable way to put user preferences ahead of website owners/designers, this seems more like replacing the web with something else entirely.
What I am taking about is not requiring users to be more technical or do more work, precisely the opposite. Make their lives as easy as possible, and design the browser from the perspective that the user is king/queen, and you literally don’t give a shit about the web designer or their business model. If what they want the site to do is incompatible with maximising user happiness, tough luck, the browser should ignore their code or markup.
Good examples of features (some) browsers incorporate which do some of the job without requiring technical knowledge, most of which should IMO be on by default:
- preventing autoplay of videos and audio
- the flag to force enable Zoom
- reader mode
- blocking ads and or trackers
- etc.
I’d love to see much more of it, and enabled by default.
This seems so obvious and yet so many technical people miss this entirely.
Most people most of the time just want a solution, they don't want the tools to solve their problem on their own terms.
Even if sites just spat out data sets in JSON, there'd still be someone bitching it wasn't in XML/CSV/whatever.
